A modular fuzzy expert system for chemotherapy drug dose scheduling

Abstract

This study presents a modular Fuzzy Expert System (FES) for chemotherapy drug dose scheduling. The computational model considers the patient’s Body Surface Area (BSA) and experts’ opinions to calculate chemo doses following the clinical practice. A proper balance between reducing cancerous cells and toxic side effects is required for effective drug scheduling. Still, in many cases, traditional clinical approaches fail to determine appropriate therapeutical doses that balance all restrictions. In our proposed system, FES-1 is developed to determine primary drug doses based on experts’ opinions and competing treatment objectives. To adjust the dose, FES-2 is developed based on clinical practices, the patient’s BSA, and experts’ opinions. The final chemotherapy drug dose schedule is generated by combining the outputs of FES-1 and FES-2, which is the proposed modular FES. A growth model is used in this work to observe response due to administration of chemotherapy drug doses and to determine the following doses by considering cancer patients’ three weight patterns (increasing, decreasing, and random order). Extensive simulation results and comparative assessment with other current computational chemotherapy drug scheduling models validate the effectiveness and the superiority of the model proposed in this study over the other methods reported in relevant studies.

Keywords

• Expert system
• Chemotherapy
• Drug scheduling
• Fuzzy system
• Expert opinion
• Simulation